Warming temperatures, dwindling fog cover and drought are causing growing seasons to shift, which means plants and trees are bursting into bloom earlier – disrupting their historical relationship with pollinators, birds and other animals, including humans.
Alexandra Hudson with ForageSF points out a red elderberry plant to a foraging group along a path in the Presidio on Thursday, March 10, 2022.
“We’re the hands of the forest, and we’re the hands of this landscape,” said Husdon, who is also a teacher at ForageSF, a Bay Area-based company that hosts classes and events centered around wild food. “For me, the wild plants are a way of falling ever more in love with the landscape.” But with few winter rainstorms and continuing drought, climate change is beginning to challenge the Bay Area’s biodiversity at a time when interest in sourcing food and medicinal plants beyond the grocery store aisles is growing.
“So much of what we’ll see out here are these very common weeds that take us all around the world, and that helps us feel at home wherever we are,” said Hudson. “And if not these exact plants, maybe their relatives. And as we get to know them, it can be this sense of belonging.” Mushroom foragers have also been tested by drought in recent years. “Dry conditions equal fewer fungi, and drought kills trees and stresses the mycelia,” said David Ruse, the North American Mycological Association president, referring to the fungal networks that connect vast swaths of forest life underground. “It wasn’t a horrible year in places that got rain, but an ongoing drought, fires, and forest diseases have huge impacts on the health of the forest.
Because the region has such a diverse and unique ecosystem, she said, “there are many plants to harvest from the Bay Area – there’s a lot of invasive plants to harvest – so unless we’re totally out of water, I would think that the Bay Area would be one of those places, just with the ocean influence, that would continue to have a diversity of plants.”
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